Increasingly more and more communication is occurring via the Internet. Electronic mail (email) is now a desired form of communication with most individuals and enterprises. Moreover, instant messaging, text messaging, and on-line chat forums are growing exponentially in their popularities. With these electronic communications, there are growing and crying needs for an improved ability to certify the authorship of content that is included with a message.
Email is a good example of the need to certify authorship of content. Consider that an average email user may receive tens or hundreds of emails daily. Some of the senders of these emails may appear to be known to the recipient, but because of the ease of spoofing the “From” field of an email, the email may not actually have originated from the sender that the recipient believes it to have come from. In addition, and even without spoofing, the average user may receive scores of emails from unknown sources on a daily basis, some of which the user may be interested in reading. These emails from spoofed known users and from unknown users are the basis of many virus attacks and provide the mechanism through which virus attacks are propagated.
The concept of securing email has been discussed, but it has not been implemented due to the overhead associated with managing the necessary certificates, which it is believed that such a deploying technology would require. The result is that secure email has been very limited in its deployment, and spammers and phishers continue to abound on the Internet.
Therefore, there is a need for techniques that attest to an author's content for purposes of verifying the content from that author (sender).